What the fiscal cliff means to you

The Tax Policy Center, a joint venture of the progressive Urban Institute and Brookings Institution, has a tax calculator that allows people to put in some of their key financial and family data and figure out how much federal taxes they’d pay under various scenarios and proposals that are out there.

I ran some figures through it and found that, depending on a taxpayer’s particular situation, two scenarios included middle class tax hikes — going over the fiscal cliff and letting all the tax laws and increases slated to take effect in 2013 go forward, or adopting a plan from Senate Republicans. The Senate GOP plan, though, featured a smaller tax hike than the fiscal cliff would require, and it doesn’t seem to hit all middle class families equally. In the scenarios I tried, the less you earn, the more your taxes seem to go up. But I only tried a couple of different income levels and family structures, and there are lots of variables. Your liability may vary.